Unlocking Solar Growth in New York and Beyond

March 30, 2020 — by Utilidata

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority
(NYSERDA) announced
that Utilidata – along with our partners, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
(NREL) and Standard Solar – has been selected to work with National Grid to prove
that our software can rapidly increase the amount of solar on the grid and
improve the profitability of solar farms throughout New York and beyond.

Twenty-nine states now mandate
that a percentage of their electricity comes from renewable resources; 13 of those states will soon require 50
percent renewables or more. In New York, Governor Cuomo recently signed a bill
that will completely decarbonize the electric grid in 20 years, including doubling solar installations
in the next five years.

Solar already constituted 40 percent of all new generation
in 2019, and these laws will accelerate that trend. This amount of solar will
overwhelm the grid if we do not quickly improve how we integrate solar with
grid operations.

Failing to address this problem will mean utility customers are
burdened with massive grid upgrade costs and solar development will grind to a
halt. The symptoms will include lengthy grid interconnection requests; huge grid
upgrade costs levied on solar projects; solar moratoriums imposed by utilities for
overwhelmed portions of the grid; and operational challenges, like poor power
quality or damaged equipment. These are not hypothetical scenarios – they are already
happening in Massachusetts,
Oregon, Hawaii
and beyond, and the solar boom is just getting started.

But there is another path forward.

A modest investment in sensors and controls, combined with
real-time, machine-learning optimization software will not only avoid these issues,
but will also create lucrative new revenue streams for solar projects, making them
even more affordable for customers. This is what our project in New York will
prove.

Real-Time, Distributed Solar Optimization

For over a decade, Utilidata’s real-time optimization
platform has been operating the distribution grid to drive
greater efficiency by reducing voltage levels. That same platform has been
shown to smooth out voltage conditions on solar-heavy circuits, effectively
increasing hosting capacity and reducing grid upgrade costs. With the NYSERDA
project, we will directly integrate our platform with smart inverters to demonstrate
an end-to-end solution that can dramatically increase solar on the grid in a
way that is safe, reliable, affordable, and fast.

Our partners in this project position us well to succeed.
NREL is the world leader in smart inverter optimization, and we will first use
their amazing testing facility –
essentially a mini-electric grid – to test the full solution. We will then deploy
it on a portion of National Grid’s system that Utilidata is already optimizing
for energy efficiency, and directly link our platform to smart inverters on one
of Standard Solar’s mid-sized solar farms, utilizing a technology we
recently acquired that puts powerful operational controls right at the
grid-edge.

With this system in place, we will demonstrate:

Reduced interconnection times and costs enabled
by better system visibility and scenario modeling

Increased solar hosting capacity without costly
system upgrades

Improved reliability from using solar to bolster
distribution system operations

Improved payback for the solar farm by adding
new revenue streams for grid services

The ability to execute this optimization in a
cyber- and grid-secure manner

Rapidly Scaling via the Smart Meter

The most important part of this solution is making sure it
can scale quickly. Many companies and research firms can analyze data offline,
demonstrate value in carefully controlled experiments, or stand up clunky
centralized systems that will quickly be overwhelmed by exponential solar
growth. But if a solution cannot scale, it’s just a science experiment. We see
three keys to scaling.

First, get the business model right. This is a core
deliverable of our New York project. Companies like Standard Solar thrive when
their projects are seamless and have predictable revenue streams. We will work
with Standard Solar and other solar partners to make sure grid integration is
attractive to both the solar company and utility.

Second, pick a scalable technology. Optimization platforms
will soon live in a world with too much information to feed back to a
centralized model that is updated every few months, at best. A scalable
grid-edge platform must use a continuously updating virtual
power flow model and utilize local data to make local decisions.

Third, the technology needs an efficient and universal
deployment channel. This is why we are embedding our solar-enabling
optimization solution in smart meters. Every new meter should come out of the
box ready to optimize solar and other distributed energy resources. The meter
is the perfect technical and commercial vehicle to drive integration of
grid-edge resources. And no company has more experience deploying software on
smart meters, as evidenced by our ground-breaking partnerships with Landis+Gyr
and Itron,
the two largest meter companies in the world.
We are grateful for New York’s leadership in
addressing the looming solar challenge. States are moving rapidly toward a
clean electric grid. Distributed optimization software is an essential
ingredient to make sure our path to that clean grid is safe, reliable, affordable,
and fast.